English in the South

Reitor

Sérgio Carlos de Carvalho

Vice-Reitor

Décio Sabbatini Barbosa

Diretor

Luiz Carlos Migliozzi Ferreira de Mello

Conselho Editorial

Abdallah Achour Junior

Daniela Braga Paiano

Edison Archela

Efraim Rodrigues

Ester Massae Okamoto Dalla Costa

José Marcelo Domingues Torezan

Luiz Carlos Migliozzi Ferreira de Mello (Presidente)

Maria Luiza Fava Grassiotto

Otávio Goes de Andrade

Rosane Fonseca de Freitas Martins

A Eduel é afiliada à

Catalogação elaborada pela Divisão de Processos Técnicos da Biblioteca Central da Universidade Estadual de Londrina

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação-na-Publicação (CIP)

Bibliotecária: Solange Gara Portello – CRB-9/1520

E58 English in the South [livro eletrônico] / organizer: Kyria Rebeca Finardi. – Londrina : Eduel, 2019.

1 Livro digital : il.

Vários autores.

Inclui bibliografia.

Disponível em: http://www.eduel.com.br

ISBN 978-85-302-0036-7

1. Língua inglesa – Estudo e ensino. 2. Língua inglesa – Globalização. I. Finardi, Kyria Rebeca.

CDU 802.0:37.02

Enviado em: Recebido em:

Parecer 1 22/07/2016 22/08/2016

Parecer 2 17/08/2016 23/08/2016

Aprovação pelo Conselho Editorial em: 09/07/2018

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CONTENTS

Introduction - Theorizing the South(s)

Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza

Chapter 1: The Growing Presence of Language Issues in Internationalization Conferences

Laura Knijinik Baumvol and Simone Sarmento

Chapter 2: Language Ideologies and English as a Medium of Instruction: Language Policy Enactment in Brazilian Universities

Telma Gimenez

Chapter 3: The Far Side of the Moon: English and Additional Foreign Languages in Higher Education Internationalization

Renata Archanjo and Márcio Venício Barbosa

Chapter 4: Epistemophagy in Brazilian Higher Education – Yes, Nós Temos Bananas

Clarissa Menezes Jordão

Chapter 5: Principles and Challenges of ELF for EFL Teaching and Teacher Education: the ELF - awareness Perspective

Nicos C. Sifakis

Chapter 6: From Looking North to Participating Globally as Empowered Users of the Language: International Posture in Chilean Learners of English.

Miguel Farías and Ioana Radu

Chapter 7: The Introduction of English in Primary Education in Colombia: Reality or Wishful Thinking?

Anne-Marie de Mejía

Chapter 8 – How Do You Spell ‘Capital?’ Examining Colombia’s English Language Policy Through Critical Lens

Yecid Ortega

Chapter 9 – Confronting the English Language Hydra in Aotearoa New Zealand

Vaughan Rapatahana

Chapter 10 – The Role of English and Internationalization in the South of the North

Pat Moore and Kyria Rebeca Finardi

Final Remarks

Kyria Rebeca Finardi

Authors’ Biodata

"The most perverse way of condemning diversity to exile is to consider that diversity is only at home in our house" (Santos).

In their reflections on the Internationalization of higher education, Peters and Murphy makes a distinction between globalization as interconnectedness on a planetary scale and internationalization as cross-border mobility still focused on the nation as a unit. Knight makes a related distinction when she calls attention to how borders may be easily crossed in some cases and remain an issue in others.

Knight, now preferring the term ‘transnational education’, establishes how internationalization in Higher Education has changed dramatically in scope and scale in the last decade involving the emergence of new actors, new partnerships, new modes of delivery and new regulations.

In this scenario, Knight also calls attention to the problematic nature of current internationalization. Though now firmly embedded in institutional mission statements and national policies, internationalization persists as a confused and misunderstood concept used to describe anything and everything remotely linked to worldwide, intercultural, global, or international educational exchanges. In a recent discussion of international education hubs, Knight notes the great variety of objectives that drive countries to prepare and position themselves as an education hub, including generating income, creating soft power, modernizing the domestic tertiary education sector, increasing economic competitiveness, building a trained work force, and, most importantly, transitioning to a knowledge-based economy.

In light of these problems and conceptual confusions, Knight had already warned about the necessity for international agreement on a set of definitions which could function as the basis for a future international protocol such as those used by UNESCO and OECD for international student mobility. However, from a less global and universalist perspective which problematizes the apparently neutral and transparent concept of the knowledge economy, and its desirability, which seem to be the moving force for nations to invest heavily in internationalization, one may perceive these issues as having their historical origins in colonization and imperialism in which power relations and multiple inequities come into the picture and complexify simple solutions for international protocols and agreements.

The Colonialities of Power, Knowledge and Being: on Epistemological and Ontological Injustice

Much of post-colonial and decolonial theorizing has already made commonplace the need for resistance and opposition to previous colonial inequities. Maldonado Torres for instance, describes the modern western university and its concept of knowledge, science and disciplines as still historically located in the after-effects of colonization. These after-effects are referred to as coloniality; this encapsulates the previous colonial hierarchy of knowledges and languages that placed some in a naturalized position of inferiority compared to others and generated a structure of control of labour and resources through which the colonizer not only justified his own superiority and the inferiority of the colonized, but also justified the controls imposed on the colonized and local resources, including knowledges and languages. Long after the end of de facto colonization, the effects of such hierarchies and controls are still visible and palpable.

Maldonado Torres exemplifies how coloniality presents epistemological challenges in the contemporary western university by discussing the demand for ethnic studies as opposed to Third World Studies in North American universities. According to his account, the modern western university, and the knowledges it harbours as knowledges, is not only built on the enlightenment separation of the secular from the theological, and the rational from the irrational, but is also built on a line that separates race or what Du Bois referred to as the colour line which was established when Europeans problematized the existence, meaning, color, worth, and status of peoples of colour; this problematization was instrumentalized, according to Du Bois, through the construction of a bio-social identity called race. Thus race, rather than a substantive biological concept, became a simultaneous denominator and justification of inferiority. In terms of the discussion of ethnic studies, the colour line played out epistemologically in the separation between what Maldonado Torres calls the humanitas versus the anthropos.

Whereas Europeans and European knowledges were referred to and included under the concept of humanitas and the whole range of academic disciplines of the Humanities, non-European or colonized peoples and knowledges were de-humanized and covered by the term anthropos. This generated a distinction between the knowledges of the humanitas as being universal and those of the Anthropos as being merely local.

The Australian social scientist Connell (226) also critiqued academic knowledge produced by and based on the metropolitan global North as local knowledge claiming to be universal. She called for a southern theory produced by and relevant to the extra-metropolitan global south. For Connell, what enables the dismantling of the hegemony of the so-called universal knowledges of the North is what she calls dirty theory. Like Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge which sees knowledge as, simultaneously, necessarily partial and necessarily contingent and located in an agonistic power field, for Connell, the goal of dirty theory is not to subsume, but to specify, not to classify from outside but to illuminate a situation in its concreteness. The dirtiness of this kind of theorizing involves unceasingly identifying the social and historical contexts of one’s thinking; it involves, not smoothing over but complexifying theoretical ideas and most importantly, the local sources of one’s thinking.

Connell’s concept of the need for de-universalizing knowledge is better understood in terms of Haraway’s (575) critique of the mainstream rejection of feminist knowledge as being always and only local: we are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view. It is disembodied knowledge, in abstraction, with no finite point of view, that has maximum academic worth. Connecting with what was mentioned above as Knight’s worries about the drive for internationalization becoming blind to certain confusions and problems, Connell (207) had warned years before: "The neo-liberal takeover bid for the world has epistemic consequences as well as economic and political. A market society built on universal commodification involves universal abstraction [our emphasis] as a fundamental part of its reality".

However, going beyond the economic, political and epistemic consequences of the universalization and abstraction of knowledge as not being located in bodies or situated in specific spaces or times, the question of the right to have or not have a body is also an ontological issue connected to Maldonado Torres’ discussion of Du Bois’ colour line. In the separation of humanitas knowledges from anthropos knowledges referred to above, lies not only the inequality imbued in the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of power, but also the inequality imbued in the coloniality of being. Similar to Du Bois’ concept of the colour line, Fanon proposed that though racism is thought to work on the sole basis of skin-colour, it may actually work more complexly along the line of the human. The line of the human purports to divide the world into a zone of being, peopled by beings of maximum humanity, and a zone of non-being, peopled by beings of minimal or inexistent humanity. Taking this into account, for Grosfoguel, from the perspective of decolonial theory and theories of epistemologies of the South, racialization involves the marking not only of bodies, but also of knowledges, cultures and languages. Those from the zone of being are un-marked and seen as superior with maximum humanity and those from the zone of non-being are racialized and seen as inferior, with a minimum of humanity. Thus, such a process of racialization produces the invisibility of bodies, knowledges, cultures, and languages. The process of racialization instrumentalized by the line of the human has dire ontological consequences, decreeing the inexistence of bodies, knowledges, cultures, and languages on the other side of the line, in the zone of non-being.

Like Du Bois’ line of colour and Fanon’s line of the human, the Portuguese social scientist Sousa Santos similarly describes modern Western thinking as an abyssal thinking which consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, of which the invisible ones constitute and are the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through a radical abyssal line that divides social reality into two realms, the realm of "this side of the line" and the realm of "the other side of the line. According to Sousa Santos, the division is such that the other side of the line" vanishes and is produced as non-existent: "What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line. Beyond the line, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, non-dialectical absence." Contrary to this prevalent idea of European Modernity, Sousa Santos proposes that the world be seen as constituted by multiple knowledges, languages, cultures and peoples, which he describes as an ecology of knowledges.

Sousa Santos defines the global South as located on the other side of the abyssal line: the side of the invisibilized ecology of knowledges, languages, cultures and peoples. The South here is a geopolitical and not a geographic location; it may also be metaphoric, but it is always inexorably epistemic and ontological. As the South lies on the side of the abyssal line that is produced as invisible, it is ontological in the sense that it refers to the side of the line on which people, knowledges, cultures and languages are produced as non-existent. There may be several Souths in the global North and there may be several Norths in the global South.

Remembering that Foucault (386) defined critique as the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth and concluded that critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility, the possibility of critique presents itself through dirty theory which connects the zones of being and non-being with the subjects and contexts that produce them; this not only makes the injustice visible but also presents alternatives. Such are the designs also of decolonial theories (represented above by Maldonado Torres, Mignolo and Grosfoguel) and those of the Epistemologies of the South (represented by Sousa Santos). Both militate as critiques of hegemonic globalization and seek to abolish the abyssal line and the epistemicide which accompanies it. Given that the abyssal line produces the invisibility of knowledges and produces the inexistence of beings, these critiques also seek to undo the ontological or epistemicidal consequences that accompany the abyssal line. Moreover, they seek to unleash and value the immense plurality of knowledges that are deemed inexistent by the abyssal line and which may then become visible and co-exist at a planetary scale in an ecology of knowledges challenging the hegemonic desire of the North for unity and homogeneity.

According to Sousa Santos (39), the major challenge to the epistemologies of the South, in a world dominated by the epistemologies of the North, is to critique the long-standing assumption of the epistemologies of the North that diversity is superficial in the sense that there is always a unifying, underlying structure that prevails and because of this, homogeneity and unity is profound and unchanging.

The opposition and resistance to the coloniality inherent in contemporary processes of hegemonic globalization within which the Internationalization of Higher Education occur more effectively not by merely challenging what was previously said and replacing previous truths with new ones, but by opening spaces for new voices to be heard. This means that more than changing what was said, it has become imperative to bring more loci of enunciation into the picture. In this changed context, it is not just any new voices and their knowledges that are heard; it is where one is speaking from that becomes significant.

It is thus not a case of merely inverting the positions of North and South, nor is it the case that the South has something to teach the North. It is the hegemonic paradigm of coloniality that is instrumentalized in the North, through its established concepts of modernity, science and universality that needs to be challenged.

The challenge proposed by decolonial theory and the Epistemologies of the South comes from a posture located in the geopolitical, epistemological and ontologically inexistent South. From this location, the local, non-universal and embodied character of the knowledges of the North can clearly be seen. This local character of the knowledges and languages of the North is hidden behind their claim to universality and hidden by the carefully produced invisibility of the body (or as Haraway says, the right to disembodiedness) of the subjects that produce them. If, by doing so these knowledges appear to be unanchored in specific contexts and hence stake their claims to universal valence, as critique, in order to transform this, it is necessary to bring the bodies and the subjects of these knowledges back into the picture. Hence the strategic importance of marking one’s locus of enunciation as situated within the geopolitical, epistemic and ontological South when engaging in critiques of hegemonic globalization and coloniality.

With this marking of one’s locus of enunciation, the histories that traverse where one is speaking from come to the fore; with these histories come the diverse experiences, cultures, knowledges and languages that constitute and traverse each locus of enunciation but were silenced and made invisible by the abyssal line of coloniality.

The concept of always being embodied and situated spatially and temporally in a particular locus of enunciation should not be understood as a fixed an immovable space but as a dynamic space of shifting borders that are reconstituted through interactions with other interlocutors producing a politics and epistemology of location. As Haraway (589) states: "I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden".

Decolonial theory and the Epistemologies of the South critically complement this politics and epistemology of the body with the dimension of coloniality of power, knowledge and being which obliterates the possibility of transparent horizontal communication between equal bodies, equal subjects, equal languages. The histories of exploitation and inequality that traverse these bodies in contact may make them existent, visible or audible to each other or not at all. Mignolo (669) connects the coloniality of power and the coloniality of being through language as follows: ‘Science’ (knowledge and wisdom) cannot be detached from language; languages are not just ‘cultural’ phenomena in which people find their ‘identity’; they are also the location where knowledge is inscribed. And, since languages are not something human beings have but rather something of what human beings are, coloniality of power and of knowledge engendered the coloniality of being.

Marginson pointed to the fact that, at present, universities of the North (especially in North America) and especially English-speaking nations of the North, function as the main attractors in processes of Internationalization of higher education. The reasons for which the North exercises such a force of attraction are historical and have effects not only on the trends, markets and demands of knowledges, but also of languages, given that the knowledges of the North come wrapped in specific languages from which they are seen as inseparable. The internationalization of higher education is traversed by the coloniality of power, knowledge and being and does not occur in a historical or ideological vacuum.

The relevance of all this for the internationalization of higher education is that it calls attention to the fact such an internationalization occurs within a context of hegemonic globalization which already establishes verticalized inequities between the knowledges, cultures and languages of certain hegemonic nations in relation to other non-hegemonic nations. Language and internationalization on a global scale needs to be seen against the backdrop of coloniality provided by decolonial theory and the epistemologies of the South.

Crises in Hegemony and Legitimacy

As was discussed above, just as there may be many Souths in the North and many Norths in the South, there may also be imbalances between universities in the global North and the global South, just as there may be imbalances between hegemonic and non-hegemonic universities within the same nation or among different nations of the global South.

Sousa Santos portrays a current institutional crisis in Higher Education involving two facets: a crisis of hegemony and a crisis of legitimacy. Firstly, the crisis of hegemony refers to the fact that traditionally the university was publicly funded and was the locus of production of high culture and social critique. In the recent neo-liberal market-oriented business-model university, the focus has moved to market-oriented and instrumental knowledge production. Secondly, the crisis of legitimacy occurs when the access to the traditional university, once selectively restricted to local elites, is replaced by less selective and wider access to the current business-model university. This university develops market-based variations such as teaching-only universities or profession-based universities. According to Sousa Santos, the crises of hegemony and legitimacy combine into an institutional crisis in which the previous autonomy of the traditional university has been replaced by a current focus on efficiency and productivity in the neo-liberal business-model university.

These crises may affect the internationalization of higher education in the global south in complex ways. Curiously, though the same business-model university has been globalized from hegemonic to non-hegemonic regions, generating an apparent homogeneity, the hegemonic pull of the global North remains, often creating in the universities in the South attitudes of client-ship and subservience in relation to the universities of the North.

Whereas the new neo-liberal business-model university depends on students as clients (for many institutions, a main source of income), the imbalances and inequalities of hegemonic globalization often permit universities of the North to include within their clientele (and hence expand it) students from outside their borders – so-called foreign students.

On the other hand, universities of the South, often following the same globalized business model, continue to count not only on their previous local clientele, but may also lose part of their (elite) clientele to the universities of the North. In spite of this, the great majority of universities in Brazil, for example, still seem to desire to reproduce the business model of the North in an effort to equalize with the North without realizing that, located within relations of coloniality, whereas the university of the North maintains the position of supplier of knowledge within a market logic, that of the South remains as mere client.

If the crisis of hegemony is a challenge to the traditional role of the university as the locus of production of high culture and social critique and represents a demand for this to be substituted by the production of currently relevant instrumental knowledge, the need of the universities of the South to emulate and promote links, often resulting in subservience, to universities of the North may result in a non-critical convergence of these two conflicting demands: the universities in the South become locally hegemonic by functioning as non-hegemonic in relation to a foreign hegemonic institution in the North. This non-critical convergence is often seen as a local solution for the local crisis of hegemony of many universities in the South, such as those in Brazil.

In other words, in order to make themselves more relevant and marketable locally, many universities of the South may be reinforcing the traditional image of the university as the locus of production of high culture and social critique, but not for themselves as universities in the South. They transfer this image to the universities of the North at the same time as they see the very same university of the North as also being the locus of production of instrumental knowledge offering solutions to current market problems of both the North and the South. When this happens, traditional knowledge and instrumental knowledge are uncritically collapsed and become one, positioning, in a continued relationship of coloniality, the university of the South as a consumer and not an equal in relation to the university of the North.

In relation to the crisis of legitimacy, which involves the traditional role of the university as a locus of restricted access being challenged by a demand for wider democratised access, the universities of the North attempt to solve their local problem of legitimacy by extending their catchment of fee-paying elite students, no longer locally, but beyond their borders globally, through their policies of internationalization.

However, the university of the South, undergoing a similar crisis of legitimacy and access, may not be able to solve its local problem to extend access through internationalization by receiving students from across its borders on the same scale as the university of the North. Unwittingly,